Taran Davies split time between making documentaries about central Asia and working as an investment banker before he committed himself fully to filmmaking in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Within weeks of the World Trade Center collapse, Davies and his Afghan-American friend Walied Osman packed up their video gear and flew to Afghanistan, hoping to use their familiarity with the region to capture the human face of a quarter-century of violent conflict, which was culminating in U.S. bombing and the Northern Alliance incursion. What they couldn't imagine, or what they ignored, was that a renewed international interest in the region would result in a wave of documentaries and fiction features about Afghanistan. It's not Davies' fault that Afghan Stories comes in the wake of Jung (War) In The Land Of The Mujaheddin, Massoud The Afghan, Kandahar, and others, but the ground covered in Afghan Stories may be overly familiar to those who stay on top of current arthouse fare. Davies documents the devastation that has reduced most of Afghanistan to rubble and shantytowns since the Soviet invasion of 1979, he reviews the restrictions and terror tactics of the Taliban, and he talks to people who used to lead productive lives but now scrounge for food and work. There are few revelations, and Davies' constant intrusion to describe his own feelings is a bush-league move, but Afghan Stories is nicely shot and edited, and the interviews are engaging. Davies and Osman live with refugees and aid workers, listening to their stories of families separated and careers ruined by decades of fighting and social tyranny. The documentary succeeds best when the subjects break out their photo albums and show what their wives and mothers looked like before they were forced to cover themselves from head to toe in robes and veils, and how nice the homes and ballrooms of urban Afghanistan were. That's an angle that the recent crop of Afghan-themed films have mostly missed in their survey of bomb sites, flatlands, and tank movements, and Afghan Stories would be better had Davies stuck with that note of nostalgia for better days. Still, he does tape the middle-aged men as they ponder how even the roughest life can seem sweet to a child, and he shows them pining for their lost civilization with palpable regret. Afghan Stories is strongest when it raises questions about whether a plot of land still has any meaning to its former residents after the institutions on it have been razed.